Understanding the psychosocial factors that positively and negatively impact on academic performance are important to help students succeed and persist within higher education. In this article, we conducted a systematic review to clarify and identify the psychosocial factors affecting university students’ academic performance. The initial search returned 1657 articles and 36 articles met the inclusion criteria. Inspection of the articles were conducted to identify the relationship between psychological and social variables on academic performance. We found that psychosocial factors were significantly related to university students’ academic performance. Specifically, academic performance was often correlated with social support, motivation, stress, satisfaction, self-efficacy, anxiety and depression, prior academic achievement, study effort, adjustment, family, and emotions.